Quotulatiousness

April 25, 2020

Minnesota Vikings 2020 draft – day two, rounds 2 and 3

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Minnesota Vikings entered the second day of the NFL’s first online draft holding twelve draft picks in total, with identified needs at offensive guard, offensive tackle, defensive end, defensive tackle, cornerback, wide receiver, and (potentially) safety. With such a long shopping list, it was widely expected that the team would be eager to move up to improve on the three day two picks:

  • Round 2 (58th overall) — OT Ezra Cleveland, Boise State. The Vikings don’t absolutely need to replace Riley Rieff at left tackle, but if Cleveland shows he’s up to the job, it gives the team a lot of flexibility on the left side of the offensive line. There was reportedly some discussion last season to shifting Rieff inside to take the left guard position, replacing Pat Elflein, and that now appears to be a stronger option for the 2020 season. Alternatively, Cleveland could be given a season at guard (although he doesn’t have the ideal body for working on the interior OL) with an eye to replacing Rieff in 2021.

  • Round 3 (89th overall) — CB Cameron Dantzler, Mississippi State. The Vikings needed at least one more cornerback and Dantzler was one of the higher-ranked day two corners on a lot of big boards. His draft stock took a hit with a slower-than-expected sprint time at the NFL combine.

    • By this point, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was starting to show the fatigue:

  • Round 3 (105th overall — compensatory pick for losing Sheldon Richardson in 2019) — traded to New Orleans for the 130th (4th round), 169th (5th round), 203rd (6th round), and 244th picks (7th round).

History-Makers: Shakespeare

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Apr 2020

“The Bard” is not only an essential class in any D&D party, but a byword for England’s most famous writer. We’ve covered a bit of Shakespeare before on OSP — just a bit, really, nothing major, only a dozen — but today we’ll look at how William got to Bard-ing, and how he accidentally became England’s biggest Historian.

SOURCES and Further Reading: The Introduction and play-texts of the Folger Shakespeare Library (The best way to read Shakespeare), “Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction” by Wells

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
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Professor Neil Ferguson – “I wrote the code (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu pandemics…”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An anonymous guest post at Hector Drummond’s blog pivots on the disturbing quote in the headline from one of the key advisors to the British government on the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

To say I was gobsmacked at his admission is an understatement. He’s one of the experts advising the government about the Covid-19 pandemic, and was consulted in previous health crises such as Foot & Mouth disease. Like the approach to combating that, we’re seeing a kind of scorched earth approach to containing another transmissible disease.

Even though the “C” programming language that Ferguson used is nearly 50 years old, the language chosen isn’t the problem. Undocumented means that modules and other code fragments are not commented, so their purpose may be unclear to someone unfamiliar with the code. In the worst case it means that modules and variables don’t have self-documenting names. For example, an accounting program could have the variables BalanceBroughtForward and BalanceCarriedForward, but a sloppy programmer might call them B1 and B2 instead – a sure recipe for confusion.

The “C” language is good to work with but has some inherent issues which can lead to subtle bugs affecting the output without causing an error. A common problem is the conditional which uses two equals signs rather than one.

To compare variables A and B for equality you would write this: if (A == B). However, it’s easy to accidentally write this: if (A = B). The latter always returns true and assigns the value of variable B to A. I have no idea whether Ferguson’s code contains any bugs, this is just one minor example of the need for strict testing.

The reason for commenting code extensively and properly is so that the programmer himself, and anyone else who maintains it, can understand what it does and how it works, reduce the chance of mistakes and avoid unnecessary effort. During my IT career I would have terminated the contract of any contractor working for me who wrote thousands of lines of undocumented code. Not only is such code a nightmare for others to work on, it can be difficult for the original programmer to maintain if coming back to it after a long time. Sloppiness in the coding raises the worry of a concomitant lack of rigour in testing, although that’s not to assert Ferguson’s code isn’t working as intended and/or wasn’t tested.

The convertible plane: smoother and scrub in ONE

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rex Krueger
Published 3 Apr 2019

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QotD: The entitlement mindset of intellectuals

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”, Cato Policy Report, 1998-01-01.

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